how the landlord was found at the murdered traveller's
bedside, with his own knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he
was hanged for the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had
indeed come there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been
stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the ostler,
years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made myself quite
uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to it as long
as I could bear the heat, looking up at the darkness beyond the screen,
and at the wormy curtains creeping in and creeping out, like the worms in
the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene.

There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had
pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it next. It
was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see
parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an
ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that seemed to be the next
best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord's
youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that pass. It was in this Inn
that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a
black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly-Tree night,
for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me
yet.

"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to bed.
But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of thought that
night. It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet, to a distant place
(though still in England), and there, alighting from a stage-coach at
another Inn in the snow, as I had actually done some years before, I
repeated in my sleep a curious experience I had really had there. More
than a year before I made the journey in the course of which I put up at
that Inn, I had lost a very near and dear friend by death. Every night
since, at home or away from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes
as still living; sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to
comfort me; always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in
association with any approach to fear or distress. It was at a lonely
Inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night. When I
had looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the
moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter. I